Scott Turow Quotes

I’m not necessarily against the death penalty. But I am damn sure against the wrong man getting executed.

I don't think I would want the responsibility for enforcing the death penalties. There's always the inevitable question of whether someone you gave the order to execute might truly have been innocent.

As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won't be put to death.

The death penalty scares the hell out of me. We now see about one out of eight errors in these convictions.

We cannot allow the spectacle of constant executions to be swept under the rug. We know that already over 100 individuals who were put on death row have been released. And we should shudder to think how many people have been sent to their deaths that were innocent.

Do I favor the death penalty? Theoretically, I do, but when you realize that there's a 4 percent error rate, you end up putting guilty people to death.

Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

It would be great to do a story and get somebody who is innocent out of jail. That's a wonderful thing.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

We've sent 130 men to death row to be executed in this country, at least 130 that we know of, who have later have been exonerated because they were either innocent, or they were not fairly tried. That's 130 people that we've locked down on death row. And they've spent years there.

Every time when there is an exoneration, and there have been hundreds of them, and somebody walks out of jail after years, people ask, “how could this happen?” …. State sanctioned killing is just wrong.

It is better to destroy 100 innocent people than to let one guilty one escape.

Some wonder why I have such a feeling of concern over the imposition of the death penalty. I ask those who wonder how would you feel if you defended a man charged with murder, who was as innocent as any hon. member in this House at this very moment, who was convicted; whose appeal was dismissed, who was executed; and six months later the star witness for the Crown admitted that he, himself, had committed the murder and blamed it on the accused? That experience will never be effaced from my memory.

I don’t think its right to have a criminal justice system that puts innocent people to death.

I have lost no sleep over the possibility that an innocent man might be executed.

I represented a man on death row whose lawyers had spent all of eight hours looking into his claim of innocence. I met men whose lawyers had never looked into their backgrounds.

My first job out of law school was representing people on death row in North Carolina, where I often saw the impact of hasty prosecutions.

Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.

Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

If one of our fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in our country is unjust and outdated.

I am not anti-death penalty, but I'm damned sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

I support the death penalty. But I also think there has to be no margin for error.

The death penalty issue is obviously a divisive one. But whether one is for or against, you can not deny the basic illogic - if we know the system is flawed, if we know there are innocent people on Death Row, then until the system is reformed, should we not abandon the death penalty to protect those who are innocent?